Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Fewer 'Gay Couples' per Census Revisions

The U.S. Census Bureau released 2010 corrections with a huge downward revision, showing that same-sex households comprise barely one-half of one percent nationwide.

The Census Bureau admitted Tuesday that it had “artificially inflated the number of same-sex couples” in the United States, initially reporting a number that was about 40 percent higher than what it now believes is accurate.

The first federal count of same-sex married couples in the USA shows 131,729 gay or lesbian couples who say they're married. That's far fewer than earlier data suggested, according to revised estimates issued Tuesday by the U.S. Census.

These statistics mark the Census' first release of state numbers of same-sex marriages and paint a clearer picture of the 646,464 same-sex couple households in 2010. (In 514,735 same-sex households, partners don't call themselves married.)

"We now know there are far fewer same-sex marriages than we thought we had because of understandable difficulties with the Census forms," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Same-sex couples make up just 1 percent of the 64 million couples in the country, including married couples and unmarried partners, and barely half a percentage point of all households.

Peter Sprigg, a senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council, said the census figures show that the number of gay couples seeking to get married is small. He pointed to a census analysis that 42 percent of same-sex couples living in states where gay marriage is legal actually wed. In comparison, there are 54 million heterosexual married couples and 8 million couples who live together but are not wed.

That 2010 tally of married gay couples is higher than the actual number of legal marriages, civil unions and domestic partnerships in the U.S. Even after New York legalized gay marriage in June, a Census Bureau consultant, Gary Gates of UCLA, put the actual number of legally recognized gay partnerships at 100,000.

The total of 646,464 gay couples in the U.S. was a downward revision of the Census Bureau's count of 901,997 released last month. The bureau said Tuesday it had to make the adjustment after determining that coding errors resulted in an exaggerated count for the initial number.

The highest share of households with reported same-sex couples — both married and unmarried — was in Washington, D.C., at nearly 2 percent. Washington was followed by Vermont, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Delaware, New Mexico and Washington state. On the other end of the scale, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming had the smallest shares, each with less than one-third of 1 percent.

. . . the Census Bureau said in a Tuesday conference call with reporters that it has revised these numbers downward “because Census Bureau staff discovered an inconsistency in the responses in the 2010 Census summary file statistics that artificially inflated the number of same-sex couples.”

“After discovering the inconsistency, Census Bureau staff developed another set of estimates to provide a more accurate way to measure same-sex couple households,” the news release said.

But the inaccuracies prompted the Bureau to devise a “Preferred Estimate,” revealed Tuesday, to more accurately depict the incidences of same-sex households, according to Martin O’Connell, chief of the Fertility and Family Statistics Branch of the U.S. Census Bureau, during a conference call to highlight the new data.